The Blackwell Companion to Natural Blackwell Companions to Philosophy This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today’s leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key fi gures, terms, topics, and problems of the fi eld. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike. Recent books in the series: 1. A Companion to Heidegger Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall 2. A Companion to Rationalism Edited by Alan Nelson 3. A Companion to Pragmatism Edited by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis 4. A Companion to Ancient Philosophy Edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin 5. A Companion to Nietzsche Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson 6. A Companion to Socrates Edited by Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar 7. A Companion to Phenomenology and Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall 8. A Companion to Kant Edited by Graham Bird 9. A Companion to Plato Edited by Hugh H. Benson 10. A Companion to Descartes Edited by Janet Broughton and John Carriero 11. A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology Edited by Sahotra Sarkar and Anya Plutynski 12. A Companion to Hume Edited by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe 13. A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography Edited by Aviezer Tucker 14. A Companion to Aristotle Edited by Georgios Anagnostopoulos 15. A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology Edited by Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks 44. A Companion to Latin American Philosophy Edited by Susana Nuccetelli, Ofelia Schutte, and Otávio Bueno 45. A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature Edited by Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost 46. A Companion to the Philosophy of Action Edited by Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sandis 47. A Companion to Relativism Edited by Steven D. Hales 48. A Companion to Hegel Edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur

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Edited by

William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication This edition fi rst published 2012 © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Blackwell companion to natural theology / edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-7657-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4443-5085-2 (paperback) 1. Natural theology. I. Craig, William Lane. II. Moreland, James Porter, 1948– III. Title: Companion to natural theology. BL175.B53 2009 212′.1–dc22 2008028316

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This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 9781444308341; Wiley Online Library 9781444308334; ePub 9781444345421; Mobi 9781444345438

Set in 10/12.5pt Minion by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

1 2012 Contents

List of fi gures vi Notes on contributors vii Introduction ix William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland

1 The project of natural theology 1 Charles Taliaferro 2 The Leibnizian 24 Alexander R. Pruss 3 The kalam cosmological argument 101 William Lane Craig and James D. Sinclair 4 The : an exploration of the fi ne-tuning of the universe 202 Robin Collins 5 The argument from consciousness 282 J. P. Moreland 6 The argument from reason 344 7 The moral argument 391 Mark D. Linville 8 The argument from evil 449 Stewart Goetz 9 The argument from religious experience 498 Kai-Man Kwan 10 The 553 Robert E. Maydole 11 The argument from : a cumulative case for the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth 593 Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew

Index 663 List of Figures

3.1 Some metaphysical options concerning the existence of abstract objects. 107 3.2 Analogy of the universe as a city laid out in a grid. 126 3.3 Model classes based on exceptions to the Hawking–Penrose singularity theorems. 132 3.4 A Gott–Li universe time machine. 133 3.5 In chaotic infl ation, an initial generic manifold undergoes regional infl ation. 140 3.6 The String Landscape infl ationary model. 141 3.7 Post-2003 cosmological model building based on fi nding exceptions to the Borde–Vilenkin–Guth Theorem. 143 3.8 Penrose depiction of Friedmann–Robertson–Walker (FRW) cosmology. 146 3.9 The de Sitter universe. 146 3.10 Evolution of an Emergent universe from a metastable loop quantum gravity state. 150 3.11 Baum–Frampton phantom bounce model. 152 3.12 Families of quantum gravity cosmologies. 159 3.13 String cosmology models and proponents. 160 3.14 Construction of the pre–Big Bang infl ation (PBBI) model is given at the “asymptotic past triviality” or APT point. 162 3.15 Rate of universe expansion versus time in the pre–Big Bang infl ation model. 163 3.16 Pre–Big Bang infl ation as a string quantum transition. 164 3.17 Pictorial description of the ekpyrotic cycle. 167 3.18 Candidate loop quantum gravity (LQG) cosmologies. 169 3.19 Quantum models with an explicit beginning to the fi nite past. 175 3.20 Creation ex nihilo of a universe. 176 3.21 Transition to “normal” time in a Hartle–Hawking approach. 177 3.22 Quantum tunneling of the universe to an infl ationary condition. 184 Notes on Contributors

Robin Collins is professor of philosophy at Messiah College, Grantham, Pennsylvania, specializing in the intersection of science and . He is the author of over 25 articles/ book chapters, including “The Multiverse Hypothesis: A Theistic Perspective” in Universe or Multiverse? (edited by Bernard Carr and published by Cambridge University Press, 2007).

William Lane Craig is a research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He is the co-author of , , and Big Bang Cosmology (Clarendon, 1993).

Stewart Goetz is professor of philosophy at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Freedom, Teleology, and Evil (Continuum Press, 2008).

Kai-man Kwan is professor of philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong. He is the author of several articles on religious experience in books and journals, including Macmillan’s second edition of Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Mark D. Linville is an independent philosopher living in Atlanta, Georgia. He has pub- lished articles in such journals as the American Philosophical Quarterly, Religious Studies, The International Journal for , and Philosophy, and Philosophia Christi.

Robert E. Maydole is professor emeritus of philosophy at Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina. He is the author of several papers with new modal arguments for the existence of a supreme being.

J. P. Moreland is distinguished professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He is the author of Consciousness and the Existence of : A Theistic Argument (Routledge, 2008) and Universals (McGill-Queen’s, 2001).

Lydia McGrew is the author (with Timothy McGrew) of Internalism and Epistemology (Routledge, 2007). viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Timothy McGrew is professor and chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is the author of The Foundations of Knowl- edge (Rowman and Littlefi eld, 1995) and (with Lydia McGrew) Internalism and Epistemol- ogy (Routledge, 2007).

Alexander R. Pruss is associate professor of philosophy at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. He is the author of The Principle of Suffi cient Reason: A Reassessment (Cambridge, 2006) and coeditor, with Richard M. Gale, of The (Ashgate, 2003).

Victor Reppert teaches philosophy at Glendale Community College and Grand Canyon University, Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason (IVP, 2003) and several articles about related themes.

James D. Sinclair is a senior warfare analyst with the U.S. Navy. He has authored numerous papers for symposia such as the Military Operations Research Society and the Combat Identifi cation Systems Conference.

Charles Taliaferro is a professor of philosophy at St. Olaf College, Northfi eld, Minnesota, USA. He is the author of Evidence and Faith: Philosophy and Religion since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Introduction

WILLIAM LANE CRAIG AND J. P. MORELAND

The collapse of positivism and its attendant verifi cation principle of meaning was undoubt- edly the most important philosophical event of the twentieth century. Their demise her- alded a resurgence of metaphysics, along with other traditional problems of philosophy that verifi cationism had suppressed. Accompanying this resurgence has come something new and altogether unanticipated: a renaissance in . The face of Anglo-American philosophy has been transformed as a result. Theism is on the rise; atheism is on the decline. Atheism, although perhaps still the dominant viewpoint at the American university, is a philosophy in retreat. In a recent article in the secularist journal Philo, Quentin Smith laments what he calls “the desecularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s.” He complains that:

[n]aturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism . . . began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy profes- sors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. . . . in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, ‘academically respectable’ to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored fi eld of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.1

Smith concludes, “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”2 The renaissance of Christian philosophy over the last half century has served to reinvigorate natural theology, that branch of theology that seeks to provide warrant for in God’s existence apart from the resources of authoritative, propositional revelation. Today, in contrast to just a generation ago, natural theology is a vibrant fi eld of

1. Smith (2001). A sign of the times: Philo itself, unable to succeed as a secular organ, has now become a journal for general philosophy of religion. 2. Smith (2001, p. 4). x INTRODUCTION study.3 All of the various traditional arguments for God’s existence, as well as creative new arguments, fi nd prominent, intelligent proponents among contemporary philosophers. Moreover, genuinely new insights have been acquired into traditional problems raised by nontheists such as the and the coherence of theism. In this volume, we bring together some of the foremost practitioners of natural theology writing today and give them the opportunity to develop their arguments at length and to interact with the arguments’ critics. The resulting volume is a compendium of theistic arguments on the cutting edge of philosophical discussion. The volume opens with an essay on the project of natural theology by Charles Taliaferro. He not only provides a historical perspective on contemporary debates over theistic argu- ments but, even more, also emphasizes the importance of issues in the philosophy of mind for the viability of natural theology. To anyone who is not open to the notion of an imma- terial mental substance distinct from a material substratum, the whole project of natural theology is abortive. For God just is such an unembodied mind, distinct from and the Creator of the physical universe. Taliaferro, therefore, seeks to show that we are far from warranted in being confi dent that substantial minds are impossible, so that we must be open to the project of natural theology. explores the fi rst theistic argument under discussion in this volume, the argument from contingency or the version of the cosmological argument classically associated with G. W. Leibniz. The argument attempts to ground the existence of the con- tingent realm of things in a necessarily existent being. Prominent contemporary propo- nents of theistic arguments of this sort include Richard Taylor, Timothy O’Connor, Robert Koons, , Stephen Davis, and Bruce Reichenbach, among others. Pruss identifi es and discusses at length four key issues that any successful defense of such an argument must address:

1 the status of the Principle of Suffi cient Reason; 2 the possibility of an infi nite regress of explanations; 3 the applicability of the Principle of Suffi cient Reason to the explanatory ultimate; and 4 the theological signifi cance of the argument’s conclusion.

A cosmological argument of a different sort, one largely neglected until recent decades, is the so-called kalam cosmological argument. Based upon the fi nitude of the temporal series of past events, the argument aspires to show the existence of a personal Creator of the universe, who brought the universe into being and is therefore responsible for the universe’s beginning to exist. Philosophers such as G. J. Whitrow, Stuart Hackett, David Oderberg, and Mark Nowacki have made signifi cant contributions to this argument. In their

3. The change has not gone unnoticed even in popular culture. In 1980, Time magazine ran a major story entitled “Modernizing the Case for God,” in which it described the movement among contemporary philosophers to refurbish the traditional arguments for God’s existence. Time marveled, “In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anybody could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers, but in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse” (Time 1980). The article cites the late Roderick Chisholm to the effect that the reason that atheism was so infl uential a generation ago is that the brightest philosophers were atheists; but today, in his opinion, many of the brightest philosophers are theists, using a tough-minded intellectualism in defense of that belief that was formerly lacking on their side of the debate. INTRODUCTION xi treatment, William Lane Craig and James Sinclair examine afresh two classical philosophi- cal arguments for the fi nitude of the past in light of modern mathematics and metaphysics and review remarkable scientifi c evidence drawn from the from the fi eld of astrophysical cosmology that points to an temporal origin of the cosmos. With this argument, we begin to see the intimate and fascinating links between natural theology and develop- ments in contemporary science that philosophers cannot afford to ignore. Those links are in full view in Robin Collins’s treatment of the teleological argument. John Leslie, Paul Davies, Richard Swinburne, William Dembski, Michael Denton, and Del Ratzsch are among the many defenders of this argument today. Focusing on the fi ne-tuning of nature’s laws, constants, and initial conditions, Collins asks how this amazing fi ne-tuning is best explained. In unfolding his answer, Collins carefully formulates a theory of probabil- ity that serves as the framework for his argument, addressing such key issues as the nature of probability, the principle of indifference, and the comparative ranges of life-permitting values versus assumable values for the fi nely tuned parameters. He argues that the evidence strongly confi rms the hypothesis of theism over an atheistic single universe hypothesis and, moreover, that appeals to a multiverse or a many-worlds hypothesis in order to rescue the atheistic position are ultimately unavailing. Finally, he assesses the signifi cance of his con- clusion for the overall case for theism. The argument from fi ne-tuning concerns the design of the universe with embodied moral agents in view. We focus on such agents in moving from the external world to the internal world of human persons in J. P. Moreland’s essay on the argument from conscious- ness. Setting aside panpsychism on the grounds that, fi rst, it is a label for the problem of consciousness’ origin and not a solution and, second, theism and are the only live options for most Western thinkers, Moreland lays out the ontological constraints for a naturalist worldview that follow most plausibly from a naturalist epistemology, etiology, and core ontology, to wit, there is a burden of proof for any naturalist ontology that ven- tures beyond strict physicalism. Moreland then presents and defends the central premises in an argument for God from the existence of consciousness or its lawlike correlation with physical states (the argument for God from consciousness, here after abbreviated as AC). Given AC as a rival to naturalism, there is an additional burden of proof for a naturalist ontology that quantifi es over sui generis emergent properties such as those constitutive of consciousness. After characterizing epistemically the dialectical severity of this burden, in the fi nal section, Moreland rebuts the three most prominent naturalist theories of the existence of consciousness, namely, the views of John Searle, Colin McGinn, and Timothy O’Connor. Contemporary advocates of this argument include Charles Taliaferro, Richard Swinburne, and Robert Adams. Partially due to the theistic connection between fi nite consciousness and God, a cottage industry of versions of physicalism has sprung up to eliminate consciousness in favor of or to reduce consciousness in one way or another to something physical. While this will be a hard sell to many, the existence and nature of reason cannot easily be treated along these lines on pain of self-referential inconsistence. Thus, Victor Reppert develops an argu- ment from reason for God’s existence based on the reality of reason in human persons. Similar arguments have been developed by C. S. Lewis and . Although the argument takes a number of forms, in all instances, according to Reppert, it attempts to show that the necessary conditions of logical and mathematical reasoning, which undergird the natural sciences as a human activity, require the rejection of all broadly materialist worldviews. Reppert begins by examining the nature of the argument and identifying the central characteristics of a materialist worldview. In so doing, he lays out the general xii INTRODUCTION problem of materialism and how the argument from reason points to a single aspect of that broader problem. Second, he examines the argument’s history, including the famous Lewis–Anscombe controversy. In so doing, Reppert indicates how the argument from reason can surmount Anscombe’s objections. He also explains the transcendental structure of the argument. Third, he investigates three subarguments: the argument from intention- ality, the argument from mental causation, and the argument from the psychological rele- vance of logical laws, showing how these demonstrate serious and unsolved diffi culties for materialism. Finally, Reppert presents some popular objections and shows that these do not refute the argument. Having laid out two features of anthropology that are recalcitrant facts for naturalists but which provide evidence for theism – consciousness and reason – a third theistic- friendly purported fact about human persons is that they are moral agents with intrinsic value. Thus, we next turn to metaethical issues, as Mark Linville presents a moral argument for God’s existence. Contemporary philosophers who have defended various versions of the moral argument for theism include Robert Adams, , Paul Copan, John Hare, and Stephen Evans. Linville argues that naturalists, committed as they are to the blind evolutionary development of our cognitive faculties in response to the pressures to survive, cannot be warranted in their moral convictions, in contrast to theists, who see our moral faculties as under the suzerainty of God. Linville also contends that atheistic views of nor- mative ethics, in contrast to theistic views, cannot adequately ground belief in human dignity. If we trust our moral convictions or believe in personal dignity, we should, then, be theists. Moral considerations raise naturally the problem of evil in the world. In his chapter, Stewart Goetz distinguishes between the idea of a defense and that of a , and defends an instance of the latter. As a prolegomenon to his theodicy, Goetz examines the purpose or meaning of an individual’s life. Although the vast majority of philosophers, including those who write on the problem of evil, have shown little or no interest in this topic for far too long, Goetz that an understanding of the purpose for which a person exists provides the central insight for a viable theodicy. This insight is that a person exists for the purpose of experiencing the great good of perfect happiness. Given that perfect happiness is an individual’s greatest good, Goetz argues that it supplies the core idea for why God is justifi ed in permitting evil. Main contemporary contributors to a the- istic treatment of evil include Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, Richard Swinburne, Marilyn Adams, Peter van Inwag and Stephen Wykstra, among many others. One aspect of the problem of evil is God’s apparent inactivity in the presence of evil and in the midst of ordinary, daily life. On the other hand, it has been the testimony of millions of people that God Himself has shown up in their lives and that they have both experienced His presence and seen effects in and around their lives that only He could do. Human persons are not only moral agents, they are ineluctably religious. According to Kai-man Kwan, the argument from religious experience contends that given the appropriate premises, we can derive from the religious experiences of humankind a signifi cant degree of epistemic justifi cation for the existence of God. Kwan has no intention of arguing here that only one particular theistic tradition (such as Christianity) is correct. He focuses on a subclass of religious experiences, the experiences of God or theistic experience, and argues that theistic experiences provide signifi cant justifi cation for belief in God. Kwan does not claim that his argument is a conclusive argument on its own, but he does think that it is a reasonable argument that can contribute to the cumulative case for the existence of God. INTRODUCTION xiii

Contemporary defenders of arguments from theistic religious experience include William Alston, Jerome Gellman, William Wainwright, and Keith Yandell. The summit of natural theology is the famous ontological argument, which would infer God’s existence starting from the concept of God as the greatest conceivable being. This argument, if successful, will give us God with all His superlative, great-making attributes. Recent defenders of the argument in various forms include , Kurt Gödel, Norman Malcolm, Alvin Plantinga, Clement Dore, Stephen Davis, and Brian Leftow. In his essay, Robert Maydole, one of the most recent philosophers to enter the lists on behalf of the ontological argument, examines classical statements of the argument along with contemporary reformulations. He argues that some versions of the ontological argu- ment are not only sound but also non-question-begging and are not susceptible to the parodies that detractors of the argument frequently offer. Our fi nal essay moves from generic theism to specifi cally Christian theism, as Timothy and Lydia McGrew develop in some detail an , the in this case being the central Christian miracle of Jesus of Nazareth’s resurrection. Scholars who have made signifi cant contributions to an argument of this sort include Wolfhart Pannen- berg, N. T. Wright, Gerald O’Collins, William Lane Craig, Stephen Davis, Richard Swin- burne, Dale Allison, Gary Habermas, and a host of New Testament historians. McGrew and McGrew’s contribution lies in their careful formulation of the argument in terms of Bayes’s Theorem, showing how, pace , miracles are positively identifi able as the most probable hypothesis despite the prior improbability of a miracle claim. They argue that in the case of Jesus’s putative resurrection, the ratio between the likelihoods of the resurrec- tion hypothesis and its contradictory is such that one ought to conclude that the resurrec- tion hypothesis is the most probable hypothesis on the total evidence. The foregoing arguments, while not exhausting the range of arguments of contempo- rary natural theology, do serve as representative of the best work being done in the fi eld today. It is our hope that the present Companion will serve as a stimulus to the discussion and further development of these arguments.

References

Modernizing the case for God. Time, April 7, 1980, 65–6. Smith, Q. (2001) The metaphilosophy of naturalism. Philo 4: 2, 3–4.